Welcome to GoogleBank, Facebook Bank, Amazon Bank, and Apple Bank

How would you like to bank with Apple, Google, Amazon, or Facebook? This is the question Fujitsu has just asked a sample of some 7,000 people throughout Europe: around a fifth said they were up for it.

As the fintech environment garners an increasing number of experiences that tend to take place outside banking or insurance, and while the big tech companies push into financial products through payment initiatives, the idea seems to be gaining traction with more and more people.

What is a bank anyway? If most of the business these days is mainly about moving bits around data bases, it’s pretty clear that the big tech companies are going to have more expertise than banks that don’t see technology as part of their business and tend to subcontract it out to the big consultancies or to simply continue doing thing like they did in the 1950s.

Most banks are way behind the tech companies when it comes to dealing with clients, when it comes to their internet systems, and most definitely when it comes to analytics, as well as the assets they hold.

Banks are generally still relatively small setups, less developed, and rooted in obsolete working practices. This is reflected in key areas such as risk analysis, which lags behind the big tech companies’ use of machine…